any revolutionary organization would need to be in a position to help them, at least in part.

hi "read_dread", anyway i was wondering what your thoghts are on the risk of just doing red charity work and what the difference between the two would be/are from your experience;

edit: also because in my experience this is what MLs tend to assume you mean when you suggest actually helping people

i really don't care for red charity work. on its own, i think it's an excellent way to reach out to people, meet with them, and talk to them, temporarily satisfy basic needs in areas that have no other adequate alternative, etc., but long-term it isn't politically viable. over time, red charity becomes indistinguishable from something like food not bombs. not to mention, without the backing of a national organization all the planning stages, outreach, and propaganda are really time-consuming and orgs end up in a position where they're indirectly contending with churches and NGOs that not only have more experience but more trust in communities. (a maoist collective i know just initiated a fucking line struggle over a botched red charity event because, after 2 months of planning, no one turned up)

i think my definition of "helping people" is more like finding out what basic social problems exist, cushioning them with direct aid for a time, and then facilitating the organization of mutual aid groups. that way, an organization doesn't become like a hand that feeds but an actual social organism that unifies people and builds some decent foundations for cooperation and class solidarity.

i’m reading anwar shaikhs “capitalism: conflict crisis whatever” and his discussion of monopoly, which is i guess his only commentary on lenin, seems to suggest that he thinks what hilferding and lenin describe is true but isn’t really monopoly but in fact “real competition”. seems like a tedious point to make and i’m not really sure about the implications. the rest of the book has cool graphs tho and really ownes keynesians

I’m old enough that my email is a bunch of different addresses that cascade like a waterfall down through a life history of spam filters into a scummy pool on the 10th level of the dungeon where I live now. I always use what I think is the oldest one when I have to provide a login to the power company billing website or whatever, and I was punching it in for the ten thousandth time today and idly wondered how old it was exactly. Then it suddenly resolved like a magic eye into actual English words in my brain for the first time in years, and I realized I could pinpoint when I created it down to the month, specifically the month between when I first read Lukacs and when I first read Althusser. So I had a nice old person’s laugh about my salad days and what a weird dork I am.

The contemporary western left is Nietzschean, not Marxian. I was reading about Guha's "Dominance Without Hegemony," specifically Vivek Chibber's criticism in "Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital," and what struck me was the poverty of the latter's critique even though I am inclined to agree with him. Guha takes Marx's understanding of the dual revolutions in France and Britain as bourgeois revolutions which were fundamentally progressive and applies it to India. In India, any kind of bourgeois revolution failed to create a stable nation state for national capital accumulation and did not penetrate the consciousness of the masses. A stable nationalist bourgeois never formed and a kind of dominance without hegemony (ideological consent) formed through everyday violence on the part of the colonizer. the theoretical point is that capitalism undermines its own universalizing tendency and it becomes the task of socialism to fulfill even the basic bourgeois tasks of the French and British revolutions. None of this is controversial to any Marxist-Leninist, it's Lenin's argument about combined and uneven development. Chibber's critique is basically anti-Marxist, as he attacks Marx's understanding of bourgeois revolutions and the dialectic itself. The substance is pointing out the historical research on the non-bourgeois class background of those who actually made the revolutions to empirically argue that they were non-bourgeois and non-feudal (what they actually are is never pointed out).

Anyway, Guha is taken as representative of "postcolonialism" since his argument is used to attack the Enlightenment and the notion of reason and progress as inherently limited to the bourgeois west and either the product of attempting to impose Western hegemony on a subaltern or liberalism only seeing the universal tendency without the contradiction smuggled into Marxism first through the second international and then through the comintern (this is Althusser's critique and is quite popular here as well, such as that Maoist book that has a thread). Guha is a Marxist but most postcolonialists are not, since the substance of Marxism is seen as Eurocentric, too tied up with Enlightenment rationality and notions of progress, and of course too tied up with actually existing socialism. Instead, Nietzsche read through Deleuze/Derrida/Foucault is basically a substitute. I don't need to get into it but it's worth pointing out that this is not as far from Marxism as we think, even someone orthodox like Losurdo wrote a book critiquing liberalism as fundamentally implicated in racism and slavery without bothering to point out the universal core of reason it implied. More importantly, in the west socialist politics actually take the form of coalitions of the excluded and identity issues are at the center of organizing, so it's unsurprising that theorists would try and dump a concept of the proletariat entirely or any theory of primary and secondary contradiction for resistance without causality. Irrationality, celebrating difference, critique of progress, these all find their highest form in Nietzsche which makes him worth reading.

You may ask what's so bad about this, and if I had to choose between Chibber's "analytic Marxism" and Guha, I would easily choose the latter. These critiques were already smuggled into Marxism anyway: the Frankfurt school critiqued the Enlightenment, autonomous/feminist Marxism questioned the concept of proletariat and labor power and the "progress" from feudalism to capitalism, third worldism and maoism already opened the possibility of rejecting causality ("the last instance" which never comes is already pretty weak) and there are parts of Fanon and Cesare which attack any common historical legacy between liberalism and Marxism (particularly the argument I've been partial to lately that fascism is the norm in the colonies and is supported by labor aristocracy and therefore the concept of "social fascism" was basically correct but implemented poorly). But in fact, just like Nietzsche leads to Heidegger and Nazism, the contemporary Nietzschean left is basically fascist in theory and leftist in practice. The critique of the bourgeois revolutions was essential to Nazi ideology and contemporary accounts are identical to Goebbel's desire to "erase 1789 from history." That's not a joke, read Mbembe for example, who uncritically combines Heidegger's fascist critique of the French revolution with contemporary liberalism's concept of fascist/communist totalitarianism. Even worse, while the initial theorists were Marxist, these days postcolonialism is an excuse not to engage with Marx or communism as a movement, and pure anti-communism as leftism is the norm among academics today (Spivak and Derrida, whatever you think of them, both wrote books defending Marxism against the very forces they had unleashed, though the books themselves are incoherent). We're in an odd situation where the western left exports its critique of reason and western history while third world communists defend them and this has a real effect on third world revolutionary movements (why the maoists in India engage with "postmodernism" in their analysis whereas in the first world we often dismiss it as limited to petty-bourgeois academia).

Obviously the solution is to dialectically think about these questions: account for all the critiques of the enlightenment and reason/progress/causality without giving up the analytic method of abstraction and history as the structural basis of the Real which can be accessed through praxis. No one ever said the French revolution was made by the bourgeoisie: the explanation has always been that the revolution as a historical movement contained the seed of the bourgeois mode of production as an abstract logic and thus its agents were bourgeois in their historical role. The focus on empiricism is a dishonest way of smuggling in a theoretical argument about abstraction as such. I personally think Nietzsche can be a part of this since he exceeds all the interpretations which reduce him to either a fascist or an anarchist/identity politician. But if people don't feel that way I get it, it's still essential to understand how deeply influential he has been on people on the left who don't even realize the problems that come from introducing irrationality and subalternity into Marxism.

Should I read Nietzsche? I know little beyond that he was reactionary and elitist.

After you read Niestszchge read the chapter on him from “The Destruction of Reason” that’s on marxists.org. Or just read that instead Idk

Unfortunately, it was Lukacs who argued there is no dialectic of the natural world and that Marxism is strictly limited to sociology (and the sub-critique of Engel's dialectic in general). This comes out of his critique of the USSR and Stalin, and once that can of worms is opened one inevitably finds oneself back on the path to Nietzsche and irrationality (since the borders between "natural science" and sociology are not stable). It's a good chapter but from the present it's important that Nietzsche won: no one defends Marxism-Leninism or the enlightenment for that matter, Lenin's claim that Robespierre was a Bolshevik before his time has been replaced with the problematic nature of a white male led revolution. Even Lukacs is pathologized as self-censoring because of the limits of Marxism-Leninism, a pure Nietzschean maneuver. This is why it's so important imo to defend communism as it actually existed, the actual Maoist movement was an attempt to recover the legacy of Stalin and the Marxism-Leninism of the 30s, one has to pathologize to justify Maoism as a break that started in the 80s or whatever, attempting to read into what Mao was "really saying" or claim that On Contradiction is fundamentally against Engels is part of this reactionary move towards pure difference against history and proletarian class struggle.

“They called Abu al-Gharib (al-Isfahani) an incarnationist, because when clear water was trickling over a lawn, he laughed sweetly with the lip of love, from the ebullition of love...” Wasiti explained this by producing another shath, saying, “Sometimes existence laughs with the mouth of power, with the mouths of the Lord.”

A stable nationalist bourgeois never formed and a kind of dominance without hegemony (ideological consent) formed through everyday violence on the part of the colonizer. the theoretical point is that capitalism undermines its own universalizing tendency and it becomes the task of socialism to fulfill even the basic bourgeois tasks of the French and British revolutions. None of this is controversial to any Marxist-Leninist, it's Lenin's argument about combined and uneven development. Chibber's critique is basically anti-Marxist, as he attacks Marx's understanding of bourgeois revolutions and the dialectic itself. The substance is pointing out the historical research on the non-bourgeois class background of those who actually made the revolutions to empirically argue that they were non-bourgeois and non-feudal (what they actually are is never pointed out).

This was a good post in general but this part really interests me because this is the same argumentation Trotskyist academia tries to rewrite Gramsci's term of "passive revolution" as a way to immediately refute every bourgeois or national-democratic revolution, in particular the Bolivarian wave

continuity and rupture on the maoist terrain by JMP. we live in the era of PPW, for 3 decades PPW has been the form of revolution (nepal/india/colombia/philippines/peru, and back further, china/vietnam). so this book's an attempt to define the major contributions of maoism as are being used in the present. not just PPW, but also the 60s-80s anti-revisionism, and the mass party as china's attempted solution to revisionism.

it reallllly couldve used more inquiry into the historical experience of PPW but i understand it was not the focus of the book. JMP's main goal was as stated to provide meaning to maoism, after the post-88 leap out of china and into the world. easy read but i wish i'd just picked something specific on peru or india.

A stable nationalist bourgeois never formed and a kind of dominance without hegemony (ideological consent) formed through everyday violence on the part of the colonizer. the theoretical point is that capitalism undermines its own universalizing tendency and it becomes the task of socialism to fulfill even the basic bourgeois tasks of the French and British revolutions. None of this is controversial to any Marxist-Leninist, it's Lenin's argument about combined and uneven development. Chibber's critique is basically anti-Marxist, as he attacks Marx's understanding of bourgeois revolutions and the dialectic itself. The substance is pointing out the historical research on the non-bourgeois class background of those who actually made the revolutions to empirically argue that they were non-bourgeois and non-feudal (what they actually are is never pointed out).

This was a good post in general but this part really interests me because this is the same argumentation Trotskyist academia tries to rewrite Gramsci's term of "passive revolution" as a way to immediately refute every bourgeois or national-democratic revolution, in particular the Bolivarian wave

Yeah Gramsci has been subject to more abuse than anybody by opportunistic liberals. Some of it is his fault, I read this piece by at one time pseudo-Trotskyist but always honest Perry Anderson

According to the civic group, the DSC suggested responding to candlelight protests by declaring garrison decree first in light of the negative connotations of martial law. If the situation deteriorated further, martial law should be considered, it said.

In order to enforce martial law, the document also suggested mobilizing 200 tanks, 550 armored vehicles, 4,800 armed soldiers and 1,400 special warfare command troops from army divisions stationed near Seoul, the civic group said.

...

"The plan for armed crackdown on candlelight protests has been confirmed to be true," the group said. "This is clearly a self-coup d'etat plan and all involved in this are believed to have committed the crime of conspiracy to commit rebellion."

The martial law plan, which calls for seizing regions with tanks and armored vehicles and crackdowns on civilians with paratroopers, is similar to the military's bloody crackdown of the 1980 pro-democracy uprising in the southwestern city of Gwangju, the group said.

The group said that a two-star DSC general drew up the document.

this dude on twitter seems to know some more details

A bit about South Korean politics topic du jour: the insane coup d'etat plan that the S Korean military had set up during the Candlelight Protests in late 2016.

According to the civic group, the DSC suggested responding to candlelight protests by declaring garrison decree first in light of the negative connotations of martial law. If the situation deteriorated further, martial law should be considered, it said.

In order to enforce martial law, the document also suggested mobilizing 200 tanks, 550 armored vehicles, 4,800 armed soldiers and 1,400 special warfare command troops from army divisions stationed near Seoul, the civic group said.

...

"The plan for armed crackdown on candlelight protests has been confirmed to be true," the group said. "This is clearly a self-coup d'etat plan and all involved in this are believed to have committed the crime of conspiracy to commit rebellion."

The martial law plan, which calls for seizing regions with tanks and armored vehicles and crackdowns on civilians with paratroopers, is similar to the military's bloody crackdown of the 1980 pro-democracy uprising in the southwestern city of Gwangju, the group said.

The group said that a two-star DSC general drew up the document.

this dude on twitter seems to know some more details

A bit about South Korean politics topic du jour: the insane coup d'etat plan that the S Korean military had set up during the Candlelight Protests in late 2016.

“We are told that among the Daghestan peoples the Sharia is of great importance. We have also been informed that the enemies of Soviet power are spreading rumours that it has banned the Sharia. I have been authorized by the Government of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic to state here that these rumours are false. The Government of Russia gives every people the full right to govern itself on the basis of its laws and customs. The Soviet Government considers that the Sharia, as common law, is as fully authorized as that of any other of the peoples inhabiting Russia. If the Daghestan people desire to preserve their laws and customs, they should be preserved”

“You are a separate people, just like the Persians and the Arabs, who have the same religion as the Turks. Your ancestors existed before the Romans and the Turks. Religion has nothing to do with nationality and statehood… Nevertheless, the question of religious beliefs must be kept well in mind, must be handled with great care, because the religious feelings of the people must not be offended. These feelings have been cultivated in the people for many centuries, and great patience is called for on this question, because the stand towards it is important for the compactness and unity of the people.”

The Muslim Religious Boards guided theoretically by the Koran, the Hadith and the maslahat / the interests of the believers to resolve questions of religious dogma. The decision / fatwa of a religious board on any religious question were brought to the knowledge of all Muslims over signature of the mufti of the Religious Board.

After the Second World War the most important Islamic establishment in the USSR was the Muslim Religious Board for Central Asia and Kazakhstan where 75 per cent of the Soviet Muslim lived. The Soviet Government depended on the Mufti of Tashkent for propagation of its views among the Sunni Muslims of the Islamic World…”

there's a poster of ai wei wei in the metro that i always go past with him standing in the foreground of a dock scene for some exhibition in marseille, and i always think that the little crane in the background is a saxophone, so the idea that he's a jazz musician has started worming its way into my mind. hope this helps

I was reading the first Fu Manchu book and it's so insanely racist that Fu Manchu is a dope smoker, because in Sax Rohmer's imagination all Chinese are degenerate addicts. Like I'm pretty sure addicts don't make for good evil geniuses set out to kill and enslave the white race.

lo posted:
i thought that book was pretty cool, unusual style. thanks to dalkey archive for publishing a bunch of incomprehensible eruopean claptrap that 10 people read

yeah Paul was almost poetic... better than the scifi or whatever (rhizzone) i usually read for a break

edit- started jo marie burt's book on shining path, cuz kersplebedeb sells it, but it seems like it is written for NGOs... like reading a chemistry lab notebook by a person taking great data but who is convinced that fire spirits make ice melt. upgrading (?) to degregori's book

Thank you all. I oppose working but the temptation to promote communism on a liberal website for small amounts of money is too great. I'm moving back in with my parents this month, so the whole plan hasn't worked out yet, but insh'allah I will be rich soon.

harper's had(has?) an amazing art director, Stacey D. Clarkson. just giving a little shout out. i had a subscription for a few years and i've been going back to cut out pics for a collage thing and its choice stuff.